Anatomy of a Skate House

The skate house. If you read this thing, you have probably lived in one or hung out in one. The skate house is at once a fascinating and disgusting place. full of character and weird novelty but sketchy and most likely unsanitary at the same time. I happen to live in a skate house. It's my skate house, and i kinda like it this way..mostly. I wish we would keep up on housekeeping a bit better, but with a bunch of guys around who collect seemingly endless pieces of "found art", coping blocks, tools and junk stacked everywhere.. it's a pipe dream. Far too many projects and far too little time to finish even half of the ones we start. heres a primer of a modern skate house dissected for your enjoyment and/or horror.

This is SkateBlock. This is what you'll see as you first approach the compound.



This is how you know you have arrived. All skate house mailboxes look similar to this.




The foyer. a fancy way to say "dumping station for wayward project crap". Most basic necessities for skate house life can be found with 10 feet of the front door. here we have some typical examples of those needs. Nearly every base is covered here with things like a half dozen cans of spray paint in a bucket, ceramic tiles, extension cords, saws, curb paint, car jacks, skateboards, tiny bicycles, impact drivers, mud boots and rain boards.



The front room will usually serve as a meeting place and will be the most often destroyed room in the skate house. It will also have many, many interesting doodads and suprises to explore. Most random objects in a skate house will find their way to window sills, and mantle pieces in the common rooms.






Skate videos are integral to a skate house common room. It will be the predominant and often only usage a television will get.


The living room will always have piles of magazines, too. It is also likely that the magazines will be ordered and tidy, no matter how badly the rest of the room is thrashed.


A proper skate house has nearly every wall covered in some bullshit or another. random objects, shitty records and old skateboards are common themes.








The time sucking corner. Obviously. You will often find the denizens of the skate house clustered around a game of Skate 2, trying to slam as hard as electronically possible.


the kitchen will usually be a biohazard, and the fridge will be empty of everything save condiments and beer. As you can see we are slippin' on the beer situation, but have condiments on lock.





The computer stations in a skate house will be cesspools of burrito wrappers, beer cans,and general garbage. We use these things to look at skate photo's, porn, Epic'ly Later'd, and to set up skate sessionswith other nerds. who cares if it's clean, nah'mean?




The bathroom...ugh, ok..just use your imagination and be assured that it's probably worse than that.


It takes a roughneck to live in a skate house for any lenghth of time and you will be tested now and again, but the endless entertainment value of having your homeboys around all the time to freak out on shit with you while having minimal rules about how to spazz out...is just simply awesome.
Long live the skate house.

Photo's that aren't necessarily good, but I still like that relate to St. Louis.

The laughable "high line" to the bent metal bed rail that was found in the yard, tacked to the top of the plywood for about 5 feet. Ahh.. can't forget to mention the badass dishwasher deathbox.

the above photo of Dan is great. Scope the fuckin' sweet old wood chipper holding this side of the bowl up. The middle section was supported by a dishwasher and the last support object was a console television..all with horse gates stacked against them and surfaced poorly.

Another example of horsegates and shitty plywood scraps used to optimum effectiveness. this stands as is with 5 screws keeping the peace. Junk skating is not about fear or safety concerns.
This is Carter. He's a fun guy. Some of the funniest road mission moments of my life are directly related to Carter. Bombing through Kentucky in a gold Cadillac listening to blaring reggae...Perfect. This ain't my photo, I dont know where it came from. I just have it.

Deaf Brian cracks me up. He teaches me to say disturbing things in sign language and draws Deaf Skateboards related doodles on all my stuff. It's awesome. This was my lighter fluid at a random barbeque. I have pics of several doodles of his that are rad somewhere, I should look.

Brian

This is Brian Drowns. he's one of the other nice, artsy, skateboarders that lives next door.He let's me use his camera sometimes to take bad photo's of good ol' skateboarding.




Brian is a photographer and lots of photo's on this blog are a product of his photographic ideas or his equipment in someone's hands.




Brian has photo's in shows and shit, too. In the future I'm going to post links to things he does and things he finds interesting because it's cool shit i normally don't get exposed to. Also he can likely crush your puny ass at Madden.
Thanks Brian.

Young Guns on SkateBlock..

Jason brought the Kid Army over to peep the new ramp and they just straight got outta the car with helmets on and went for it. Kadin and Olaf are the youngest of the TRB, and soon enough they'll be schooling the rest of us on how to make tricks happen. These kids rule.

So, I brought the kids....


"hey old guys...your placement of this box sucks."









Kadin: "hey Dad...this wedge sucks too."
Jason: "skate it anyway, kiddo. this is Portland and this is what we do."







You kids get outta my damn yard.

Reggae pit stop!

this rad Jamaican born, gangster ass, straight up rasta guy cruised by skateblock today and sang for us. it was awesome. I talked to him about the realities of jamaica for awhile and damn if that aint some hairy shit to hear from the first person perspective. Jamaica is not an island paradise...unless you are white and sequestered.


Reggae Pit Stop from brian drowns on Vimeo.

Olaf The Destroyer

Lil' shit almost beat me at SKATE using wierd boneless' and stuff.

afternoon project

This is real deal "Man Coping"

nest redux.

for those who aint seen what we do yet..kings of the trash ramp por vida.

Viva La Nest Life.

Gary Brammer.

This is wet willies waterslide in the derrty derrty STL. fun old spot, heres a front rock.

Table leg pole jam.

This is the thing we built in STL to entertain ourselves.
Brian werner (DeafSkateboards.com) learned us all how to do pole jams this day.
good friends, good times, good slams.

More Winter Humbler...

Max, back Boneless tail smacker:

Max doing that single truck grinding thing:

Dirty old brujo learned to front pivot:

Front rocks for everyone!
Me:

Maxwell:

all pics are taken by me except the pictures of me, which Max took.

Brigham gets it on

heres some pic's of brig's getting busy.. all photo's are mike goetz's @ theskateboardarchives.com except the last ramp photo which was taken by Max rees.